Why Doesn't Communism Have as Bad a Name

as Nazism?
By Dennis Prager

http://97.74.65.51/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=34460

FrontPageMagazine.com | Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Why is it that when people want to describe particularly evil individuals or regimes, they
use the terms "Nazi" or "Fascist" but almost never "Communist?"

Given the amount the human suffering Communists have caused - 70 million killed in
China, 20-30 million in the former Soviet Union, and almost one-third of all
Cambodians; the decimation of Tibetan and Chinese culture; totalitarian enslavement of
North Koreans, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Russians; a generation deprived of human
rights in Cuba; and much more -- why is "Communist" so much less a term of revulsion
than "Nazi?"

There are Mao Restaurants in major cities in the Western world. Can one imagine Hitler
Restaurants? Che Guevara T-shirts are ubiquitous, yet there are no Heinrich Himmler T-
shirts.

This question is of vital significance. First, without moral clarity, humanity has little
chance of avoiding a dark future. Second, the reasons for this moral imbalance tell us a
great deal about ourselves today.

Here, then, are seven reasons.

1. Communists murdered their own people; the Nazis murdered others. Under Mao
about 70 million people died - nearly all in peacetime! - virtually all of them
Chinese. Likewise, the approximately 30 million people that Stalin had killed were
nearly all Russians, and those who were not Russian, Ukrainians for example,
were members of other Soviet nationalities. The Nazis, on the other hand, killed
very few fellow Germans. Their victims were Jews, Slavs, and members of other
"non-Aryan" and "inferior" groups. "World opinion" - that vapid amoral concept -
deems the murder of members of one's group far less noteworthy than the
murder of outsiders. That is one reason why blacks killing millions of fellow
blacks in the Congo right now elicits no attention from "world opinion." But if an
Israeli soldier is charged with having killed a Gaza woman and two children, it
makes the front page of world newspapers.

2. Communism is based on lovely sounding theories; Nazism is based on heinous

sounding theories. Intellectuals, among whom are the people who write history,
are seduced by words -- so much so that deeds are deemed considerably less
significant. Communism's words are far more intellectually and morally appealing
 than the moronic and vile racism of Nazism. The monstrous evils of communists
have not been focused on nearly as much as the monstrous deeds of the Nazis.
The former have been regularly dismissed as perversions of a beautiful doctrine
(though Christians who committed evil in the name of Christianity are never
regarded by these same people as having perverted a beautiful doctrine),
whereas Nazi atrocities have been perceived (correctly) as the logical and
inevitable results of Nazi ideology. This seduction by words while ignoring deeds
has been a major factor in the ongoing appeal of the left to intellectuals. How
else explain the appeal of a Che Guevara or Fidel Castro to so many left-wing
intellectuals, other than that they care more about beautiful words than about
vile deeds?

3. Germans have thoroughly exposed the evils of Nazism, have taken responsibility
for them, and attempted to atone for them. Russians have not done anything
similar regarding Lenin's or Stalin's horrors. Indeed, an ex-KGB man runs Russia,
Lenin is still widely revered, and, in the words of University of London Russian
historian Donald Rayfield, "people still deny by assertion or implication, Stalin's
holocaust." Nor has China in any way exposed the greatest mass murderer and
enslaver of them all, Mao Zedong. Mao remains revered in China. Until Russia
and China acknowledge the evil their states have done under communism,
communism's evils will remain less acknowledged by the world than the evils of
the German state under Hitler.

4. Communism won, Nazism lost. And the winners write history.

5. Nothing matches the Holocaust. The rounding up of virtually every Jewish man,
woman, child, and baby on the European continent and sending them to die is
unprecedented and unparalleled. The communists killed far more people than
the Nazis did but never matched the Holocaust in the systemization of murder.
The uniqueness of the Holocaust and the enormous attention paid to it since
then has helped ensure that Nazism has a worse name than communism.

6. There is, simply put, widespread ignorance of communist atrocities compared to

those of the Nazis. Whereas, both right and left loathe Nazism and teach its evil
history, the left dominates the teaching profession, and therefore almost no one
teaches communist atrocities. As much as intellectuals on the left may argue that
they loathe Stalin or the North Korean regime, few on the left loathe
communism. As the French put it, "pas d'enemis a la gauche," which in English
means "no enemies on the left." This is certainly true of Chinese, Vietnamese,
and Cuban communism. Check your local university's courses and see how many
classes are given on communist totalitarianism or mass murder compared to the
number of classes about Nazism's immoral record.

7. Finally, in the view of the left, the last "good war" America fought was World
War II, the war against German and Japanese fascism. The left does not regard
America's wars against communist regimes as good wars. The war against
Vietnamese communism is regarded as immoral and the war against Korean (and
Chinese) communism is simply ignored.
Until the left and all the institutions influenced by the left acknowledge how evil
communism has been, we will continue to live in a morally confused world. Conversely,
the day the left does come to grips with communism's legacy of human destruction, it
will be a very positive sign that the world's moral compass has begun to correct itself.

Dennis Prager hosts a nationally syndicated radio talk show based in Los Angeles. He is
the author of four books, most recently "Happiness is a Serious Problem"
(HarperCollins). His website is www.dennisprager.com. To find out more about Dennis
Prager, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.